Cinélatino: “Eami” by Paz Encina, getting caught up in the ear and the hand

Eami de Paz Encina was filmed in Paraguay among the Ayoreos with the children and adults of the community.

It is the children who interpret the main role of the god-bird in search of his people in the forest.

© Cinelatino 2022

Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec

4 mins

The third and latest feature film by Paraguayan director Paz Encina is in official competition in the feature-length fiction section at the Rencontres de Toulouse.

Eami

, which means the forest/the world in the Ayoreo language, is an unclassifiable work, deeply moving as long as one lets oneself be immersed in the sound and visual universe of the story.

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From our special correspondent in Toulouse,

Eami

is a braided strand of the song of the earth, the breath of the wind, and the lament of the Ayoreo Indians of the Gran Chaco in Paraguay.

He is a child, the incarnation of the bird-god, who walks in search of his people scattered in the forest.

Indians driven from their land by white settlers, in the film played by a

Mennonite woman

(settlers of European origin who arrived at the beginning of the 20th century) and its two peons.

Indians, some of whom refuse forced sedentarization and either let themselves die or flee deeper into a shrinking forest.

The first images of the film: four fragile eggs placed on the ground and in soundtrack, the sounds of the forest: breeze, cries of animals, screeching of insects, engines of clearing machinery... noises that swell and we tremble for the eggs, symbols of the fragility of this nature and of the beings that have inhabited it since the dawn of time.

A sound score

Already crowned by the grand prize of the Rotterdam festival, the film is first of all a sound universe, then a visual one.

Usually we think of images for a film;

here we must speak of sound immersion first.

The director, who was unable to come to Toulouse, had already had the opportunity to explain how she worked at the invitation of the Cartier Foundation in 2018 during an installation on trees (

We the trees

) .

She then presented sequences of what would later become this feature film and how she worked: the sound universe comes first.

Trained as a classical musician, she says she learned the notes before reading and her sound imagination commands the image and the script.

When I

, she explains,

the opposite is not true

 ”.

It is also the sound that determines for her the duration of a shot, the image-time relationship

.

“My relationship to the story is a relationship to time, to rhythm 

”.

A poetic approach that finds its full fulfillment in this third feature film.

The forest is only sounds for those who know how to listen.

And to the "natural" sounds are added the sounds produced by men and they are aggressive: these are the angry barking of dogs, the vociferations of white men, the noise of the engines of machines... It is also fire.

On this sound score also comes the quest of Eami, a singing voice of a little girl, who is looking for her friends and the spectator accompanies this quest, at the height of a child in the green tunnels of the forest.

Another line of "note", the accounts of expulsions from the forest by adult voices.

A story built during the director's many stays in an Ayoreo community, some of whose members are the actors in the film.

She had also come to the Cartier Foundation with one of its representatives, Tagüide Picanerai,

The announced destruction of the Gran Chaco

The cinematographic work of Paz Encina is deeply rooted in the history of his country.

In her previous films,

La hamaca paraguaya

(awarded the Fipresci Prize at Cannes in 2006) and

Ejercicios de Memoria

(in 2016), she explored other sequences: the Chaco War (which opposed Bolivia to Paraguay in 1932- 1935) with this old couple awaiting the return of their son from the war, and

Alfredo Stroessner

's dictatorship - the longest in Latin America of which his own family was a victim - through the exploration of police archives.

In this last film, it is on the announced destruction of the natural environment and those who inhabit it that she launches this cry of alarm.

The Gran Chaco, which extends over several countries (Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina) is the most destroyed forest in the world, even before the Amazonian forest.

It is a victim of the soy agro-industry in particular, inherited from the dictatorship, and also in the hands of the Menonni settlers.

The

crackling of the fire

, the red light which tints the screen, recall this threat.

“ 

I have the small hope that we can still speak in the present when we speak of the forest

 ,” said Paz Encina at the Cartier Foundation.

This is also the message conveyed by

Eami

, the child-bird and this film.

To read also

Cinélatino 2021: to the Ayoreo people of Paraguay, the tribute of the director Arami Ullón

The Gran Chaco forest is threatened with destruction by agro-industry, peoples and species that inhabit this immense territory (in three countries) too.

The Jesuits who landed in this region in the 18th century nicknamed it "the Babel of America" ​​because of its cultural and linguistic richness.

© Paz Encina "Eami" Cinelatino

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